Books
The big ideas from popular books, without giving the whole thing away. Get the GIST, then decide if you want the REST.
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Pick as many as you like: any of them matches within a group.
81 summaries, page 1 of 4
A Very Typical Family
Fifteen years after her actions sent her siblings to prison, Natalie Walker must return to Santa Cruz and reunite with them to inherit their late mother's house, in a darkly funny, tender debut about guilt, forgiveness and second chances.
Broken Country
On a Dorset sheep farm in 1968, a grieving wife's first love comes home with his young son, and a love triangle slides toward a killing and a murder trial.
Dear Edward
A twelve-year-old boy is the only survivor of a plane crash that kills his family, and must learn, slowly and with one fierce friend beside him, how to live afterward.
Demon Copperhead
Barbara Kingsolver moves David Copperfield to the mountains of Virginia, where a red-haired boy nobody wants narrates his way through foster care, football glory and the opioid epidemic.
Everything I Never Told You
In 1977 Ohio, the favorite daughter of a Chinese American family is found drowned in the town lake, and her parents and siblings discover how little they knew her or each other.
Life of Pi
A sixteen-year-old Indian boy survives a shipwreck and drifts across the Pacific in a lifeboat he must share with a Bengal tiger.
Little Fires Everywhere
A wandering artist and her daughter rent a house in rule-loving Shaker Heights, and a custody fight over a baby sets two mothers, and two ways of living, against each other.
Never Let Me Go
Three friends from an idyllic English boarding school slowly learn what they were made for, in Kazuo Ishiguro's quiet, devastating novel about love, memory and mortality.
The Electric
In the late summer of 1985, a fifteen-year-old finds an abandoned cinema that screens films made by ghosts, for ghosts, in a bittersweet coming-of-age story about loss and the magic of movies.
Where the Crawdads Sing
Abandoned as a child in the North Carolina marsh, Kya raises herself among the gulls and tides, until the town's golden boy turns up dead and she is the one accused.
Bible - Book of Genesis
The Bible's book of beginnings: the creation of the world, the first humans, the flood, and the family of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph, bound to God by promise.
Bible - Book of Exodus
Israel's founding story: slavery in Egypt, Moses and the burning bush, the plagues and the sea, and then the covenant, the commandments and the tabernacle at Sinai.
Bible - Book of Leviticus
The priestly heart of the Torah: how a people is to live beside a holy God, through sacrifice, purity, the Day of Atonement and the command to love your neighbour as yourself.
Bible - Book of Numbers
Israel's forty years between Mount Sinai and the Jordan: two censuses, a refusal at the border of Canaan, a generation lost in the desert and a new one made ready.
Bible - Book of Deuteronomy
Moses' farewell speeches on the edge of the promised land: the story so far, the law restated, a covenant to choose, and the death of Israel's greatest prophet.
Bible - Book of Joshua
After the wilderness, Israel crosses the Jordan under a new leader, takes and divides the promised land, and is asked to choose whom it will serve.
Bible - Book of Judges
Between Joshua and the kings, Israel falls again and again into unfaithfulness and is rescued by flawed champions such as Deborah, Gideon, Jephthah and Samson.
Bible - Book of Ruth
A widowed foreigner's stubborn loyalty to her mother-in-law turns famine, grief and emptiness into a harvest, a marriage and the family line of King David.
Bible - Book of 1 Samuel
Israel asks for a king and gets Saul, who rises and unravels while a shepherd named David, anointed in secret, kills a giant and spends years on the run from the man he will replace.
Bible - Book of 2 Samuel
Israel's greatest king wins a nation, receives a promise that his dynasty will last forever, then watches his own sin tear his family apart.
Bible - Book of 1 Kings
From Solomon's wisdom, wealth and Temple to a kingdom split in two, a line of failing kings, and the prophet Elijah's lonely stand against Ahab and Jezebel.
Bible - Book of 2 Kings
From Elijah's chariot of fire to the burning of Jerusalem, the story of how two kingdoms ignored their prophets and lost their land.
Bible - Book of 1 Chronicles
Israel's story retold for a later age: long family lines from Adam to the tribes, then David as the king who brings the ark to Jerusalem and prepares everything for the Temple.
Bible - Book of 2 Chronicles
Four centuries of Judah's kings, from Solomon's golden Temple to its ashes, told as one long lesson that God hears those who humble themselves and turn back.